PhD conferral Ms Minye Zhan, MSc.

Key words: processing emotional bodies, continuous flash suppression, understanding actions and emotions, consciousness, 3T and 7T fMRI

“The invisible body; the neural mechanisms of non-conscious and conscious processing of emotional bodies”

How do we process emotions expressed by bodies when we don’t realize we are looking at them? This research made body postures invisible for participants by using the “continuous flash suppression” method. It turned out that processing bodily emotions is very different from processing faces, and is different across emotions (e.g. neutral, fearful, angry), both when participants consciously see them and when they see them outside their awareness. The research also looked in detail at the brain activity with the 7T MRI scanner, and found that understanding bodily actions involves a large network across the brain. This research provides insights in the way we understand actions and emotions.